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A correlation coefficient is a numerical measure of some type of linear correlation, meaning a statistical relationship between two variables. [ a ] The variables may be two columns of a given data set of observations, often called a sample , or two components of a multivariate random variable with a known distribution .
Pearson's correlation coefficient is the covariance of the two variables divided by the product of their standard deviations. The form of the definition involves a "product moment", that is, the mean (the first moment about the origin) of the product of the mean-adjusted random variables; hence the modifier product-moment in the name.
The Fisher transformation is an approximate variance-stabilizing transformation for r when X and Y follow a bivariate normal distribution. This means that the variance of z is approximately constant for all values of the population correlation coefficient ρ. Without the Fisher transformation, the variance of r grows smaller as |ρ| gets
Some correlation statistics, such as the rank correlation coefficient, are also invariant to monotone transformations of the marginal distributions of X and/or Y. Pearson/Spearman correlation coefficients between X and Y are shown when the two variables' ranges are unrestricted, and when the range of X is restricted to the interval (0,1).
Notably, correlation is dimensionless while covariance is in units obtained by multiplying the units of the two variables. If Y always takes on the same values as X , we have the covariance of a variable with itself (i.e. σ X X {\displaystyle \sigma _{XX}} ), which is called the variance and is more commonly denoted as σ X 2 , {\displaystyle ...
For this reason, covariance is standardized by dividing by the product of the standard deviations of the two variables to produce the Pearson product–moment correlation coefficient (also referred to as the Pearson correlation coefficient or correlation coefficient), which is usually denoted by the letter “r.” [3]
The coefficient of determination then becomes = = and is the fraction of variance of that is explained by . Its square root is Pearson's product-moment correlation r {\displaystyle r} . There are several other correlation coefficients that have PRE interpretation and are used for variables of different scales:
The correlation ratio was introduced by Karl Pearson as part of analysis of variance. Ronald Fisher commented: "As a descriptive statistic the utility of the correlation ratio is extremely limited. It will be noticed that the number of degrees of freedom in the numerator of depends on the number of the arrays" [1]